While new wearable hardware might be getting all the media attention, Forrester shows that wearable apps are the key to help companies produce a connection with their clients and the capability to examine big data produced from wearables. According to a Forrester analyst, “these wearable devices will fail to work and people will toss them aside if there isn’t really a good service layer that opts for them.”.
Few visionaries in marketing and product strategy has grasped the capacity of smart wearable computing and intuitively comprehend how it will transform the way we work, play and connect with the world around us. You’ve read the statistics on venture-backed capital flowing into wearables and the difficult dollars being invested by Samsung, Google, Apple, Intel, Facebook (Oculus for $2 billion) and other tech giants. So you do not have to be persuaded that smart wearables represent a tectonic shift in calculating paradigm. What you’re considering is how can your company enter this nascent market in the most sagacious manner. What are the best practices that you and your executive cohort can use to rationalize how your company can tackle establishing wearable apps.
Here’s an useful framework for wearable use case development that will help crystallize your wearable app strategy:
Avoid development on Dumb Sensors.
Overinvesting in early hardware might make your wearable app development outdated even before it’s introduced. Numerous of today’s so called wearables are “dumb” sensor-laden devices (SLDs). As Owen Thomas rightly remarks glorified pedometer like that of Nike Fuelband should die. In years to come, these basic physical fitness and health SLD’s will become obsolete as nanomaterials and nanosensors are incorporated into our bodies, clothes, bags, jewelry, belts, hats, seats and other inanimate things around us. The MJ Bale Power Match for contactless payments with Visa’s payWave exhibits how NFC chip and transmitter can be integrated into the sleeve of the match near the wrist, eliminating the have to carry a bulky wallet or secure a smartphone for purchases.
The notion of connected intelligence shows that wearable devices must go beyond simply noticing, linking and reporting. Smart wearable devices need to be able to process data independently and be more than a remote sensor, but a smart node with picking up, connectivity and embedded processing.
Thus, if you are believing about building a wearable app, make certain that it’s based upon a smart node that has the prospective to become a full-fledged computing system.
Develop to Learn, Not to Perfect
Evernote CEO Phil Libin acknowledges that it’s far too early to choose a winner, or to pretend that anything they’re doing now will look at all like finished items readily available to a fully grown wearables market.
Phil alerts companies about taking a wait-and-see strategy. If they do, he says “you risk being left behind … I believe you’re going to see companies flaming out left and right that just ignored this, which simply focus on what they have been focusing on and are then totally unprepared for this new world.” Libin recognizes that experimentation is not optional if they desire to remain appropriate. Evernote is establishing apps for Android Wear, Pebble, Google Glass, Samsung Gear and other smart wearable devices.
For your organization, it may not make good sense to have a wearable app on every smart wearable hardware. Rather the point is that wearable app development has to be understood by internal stakeholders that it’s an iterative process to build on fresh understandings gotten with each development cycle. Moreover, hardware and operating system (OS) improvements will need your app to be updated to take advantage of new features and functions.
Don’t Let the Hardware Drive the Use Cases
Do not make the error of falling into the herd mindset. It may be appealing to announce that your company is going to build a Google Glass app since Glass is at the forefront of limelights. Their basic release product is not most likely to cover all possible use cases for an immersive increased reality (AR) experience. So before choosing a device, let your business use case drive the design process.
As you vet out the use cases, the reality of what’s not possible will undoubtedly enter the image but starting with a hardware-driven technique will eliminate your imagination even before you put your thinking cap on; you will be handicapped from the beginning. Rather, start with a persona and what is it that s/he is attempting to accomplish through your wearable app.
For illustrative purposes, let’s state that you require to provide an engaging business case on why your firm need to pursue a wearable app to your executive guiding committee. In this example, the have to produce desktop quality discussion becomes your wearable use case. (This idea of using wearables for productivity is not too far off as we migrate from PCs to tablets and ultimately to wearables. Office for iPad apps reached 27 million downloads in 46 days.).
Before too soon constraining yourself with what you can’t or can do with the existing wearables, do some creativity.
Often you do your best work not in front of a desktop but doodling on a whiteboard. In the current state, after sketching out your work of art on the white boards, you take a photo then use it as a reference to manually recreate your presentation on PowerPoint. What you actually want is the ability to do it as soon as with precision. What if you could have a virtual white boards via augmented reality forecasted unto your office wall and then using hand gestures compose and draw diagrams to communicate your ideas on the virtual canvas?
Once you finish your doodling, you want your scribbles to convert to sharp, legible text and your lopsided diagrams to transform into SmartArt Graphics to convey your ideas professionally. For more accuracy format, you can do everything that you would carry out in PowerPoint but using your fingers to drag and drop, stretch, resize and alter formatting attributes. Voilà, your masterpiece is completed, ready for primetime. After running spell and grammar check, you upload the virtual presentation to your enterprise cloud or email to a few stakeholders to give them a preview before the big conference next week.
Map the Use Case to Wearable Devices for Fit Assessment
Create concerns pertinent for the wearable context and permit the use case to figure out the best available wearable hardware for the task.
Continuing the use case example from above, are smartglasses the best metaphor? Would that be cumbersome for individuals in a workplace setting? Would people like to interact with a finger-mounted, input device? Would they be more comfy doing things while sitting or standing? How would individuals move to produce an AR discussion?
After much deliberation, you may narrow your options to AR smartglasses such as MetaPro or gesture-control devices such as the Ring and Nod. Naturally, a ring-based input device, just like a Wii controller, does not replace the requirement for a big screen or PC; it’s just replaces the physical keyboard and mouse.
Partner With Device Makers to Shape their Product Roadmap
Software and hardware has a symbiotic relationship. You can’t build your killer app if the hardware and wearable OS does not support the needed capability. Similarly, device makers have to connect with device users to comprehend what capabilities are required. So after you’ve limited the leading wearable hardwares, reach out to those wearable device makers to see if they’re open to collaborating with you. Actual life use cases will be seen tremendously valuable to these hardware firms.
Take MetaPro, for example, they are passing away to comprehend engaging use cases for their smartglasses as confirmed by their Submit App Ideas page. Instead of anecdotal and half-baked recommendations from random individuals, you can give them real-life use cases that they can sink their teeth into.
OS standards and abilities might be a bit more trickier to affect as a single company however through the developer community for Android Wear, Tizen and iOS, you can find a voice.
Do It Again
Set a practical expectation with your internal champions that this is not a one-time project but a continuous commitment to iterate. As wearable computing systems and OS advance, your wearable app needs to be encompassed make the most of new abilities.
Source: Wired
